New Qwest DSL Speeds > What is up with CABLE?

What is up with CABLE?

DSL has always been teh better technology IMO. Something about sharing limited bandwidth with the whole neighborhood doesnt sit well with me. I know they are doing this with remote DSLAMS, but only because it's necessary. If I were in that situation I'd go with DSL anyway, mainly because it's a helluvalot more stable than cable. I've had Qwest 1.5Mbps/896Kbps for over a year now, and it's gone down once, for only 3 hours. Wehn I had Mediacom (crap) cable it was down two or three times a month for a day or two at a time.

In my opinion, DSL's advantage is upload. At some point, we're all shared and I think cable has massive download bandwidth -- enough to match DSL's "less shared" architecture. The real problem is on the upstream side. Because on cable that too is shared, everyone gets assigned a time slot on which to transmit. If everyone talked at once, it would trash everything. DSL doesn't have this problem and should eventually be able to create upload speeds that cable simply cannot match, no matter what modulation tricks they use.

Of course having more doesn't mean anything if it isn't what people want. I suspect that most users are still very asynchronous -- using far more downstream capacity than upstream capacity. Certainly peer-to-peer file trading is reason enough but I suspect the majority will need some other application that thrives on upstream bandwidth before it becomes a driver toward synchronous speed packages (downstream = upstream speed packages).

reply to ssego
You do realize that you are sharing your bandwith with everyone else no matter what technology you use right? DSL has been harping that line for years. Its all shared. You dont have a direct line to anything. If the CO in the area does not have enough bandwith piped to it then its no different than if a cable company doesn't have the bandwith in an area.

sure, if you want to go that deep we're ALL sharing bandwidth. The difference to note though is that DSL subscribers hardly ever complain about signifcantly lower speeds than what they are paying for, wheras I've heard that cable subscribers usually deal with much lower speeds during peak hours. Its not the technology's fault, its the greedy cable company not feeding the nodes with enough bandwidth.

In some cases it could be technology's fault. Cable works much like an Ethernet hub. If you put too many people on the hub, it's going to get slow. However, if you realize the technology's limitations, you add a new hub that's uplinked to a switch rather than keep plowing more and more people on the same hub.

Ultimately it is the cable company's fault for not managing the limitations of its technology.

Being a cable HSI subscriber for nearly five years, I do agree that it is less the fault of a DOCSIS infrastructure and more the fault of insufficient pipes from the NOC to the Internet -- especially when everyone gets slower during peak periods.